EP 687 Is America Fighting a Half-Hearted War on Poverty?

The richest nation in the history of the world can do better.  Let’s be honest.  Whether you live in a pocket of destitution, or just drive by it, don’t you get the sense that something is wrong if millions of people, urban and rural, live in the squalor that you can see, even just passing by? Nikhil Goyal, a sociologist and former U.S. Senate staffer dealing with these issues, took a deep dive into North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, and put his on the ground observations into his new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.”  In it he profiles the chaotic lives of three young Puerto Rican boys who are by no means guaranteed an eighteenth birthday as a rite of passage.  It feels more like a test of survival as they navigate the hypermasculine logic of the streets.  And while Senator Tim Scott suggests the American Dream is now available to all, given his example, according to statistics his story is one of an outlier.  In the Philadelphia we visit in this podcast, only one in 13 goes on to overcome the many impediments they started out life with. The lottery they lost from the get go is a real challenge to difficult for so many to overcome. We discuss possible answers to a problem which continues to vex America.

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